It lacks and lacks. The paint chokes me and I ache.”
As if to cleanse body as well as mind, she fasted on orange juice and eggs and pored over the poems of Walt Whitman and the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. She particularly liked Whitmans optimism and, no doubt, his joyous disregard for tradition. She learned sections of Leaves of Grass by heart – ignoring, of course, the “fleshy” bits. Some parts of Whitman must have read to her as if he was spurring her on from the grave. “The earth does not argue,” Whitman wrote, “Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out.” These were certainly words that a woman who felt “shut out” for much of her life would have valued.
She constantly questioned the quality of her work. Although she craved compliments, she could hardly believe people who told her the paintings were good. “Why can’t I take all the nice things they say like a dainty dish one is offered by a hostess?” But no, she was sure those who praised her couldn’t know “good work” or how could they praise hers? And yet if praise didn’t come from the right people, she flew into a fury and refused to speak or write to them, sometimes ever again.
In the summer of 1931 she went to Coldstream Flats north of Victoria, to try to capture in her sketches the free, swinging motion of its large cedar trees. Perhaps their grace reminded her of the old cow ambling across Small’s cow yard, the looseness of its red and white body swaying as if in a high wind. By now, Emily had a certain routine. She walked into the woods, perhaps tripping a bit, and looked for an open space in which to set her camp stool. When she found it, she simply sat and smoked a cigarette and waited. Slowly, things began to move. Air slipped between the leaves of trees, sunlight began to dance, and colours came out until everything was alive, full of sound and shape and shadow. Then, with her sketch board in front of her, she unfocused her eyes a little, straightened her arm, and began to paint or draw with large, flowing strokes that echoed the sweep and ease of the cedar boughs dancing above her.
She was also using a different medium. In the past Emily had used artists oil paints or charcoal, which worked well in the rain. But now, driven partly by financial need, she bought several one-gallon cans of good quality house paint, thinned them with lots of gasoline, and began painting on large sheets of Manila paper. Using broad bristle brushes she could get the fresh colour and quick drying effects of watercolour, with the colour intensity of oils. Most importantly, the cheaper materials let her feel free to play with her medium, to experiment and make mistakes. Many of the sketches she painted in this way were so full of spontaneity and energy that they became finished pieces, and Emily used the technique even in her studio.
Lawren Harris raved about these latest sketches, telling her they were “unusually individual” and “saturated with what you are after.”
Emily was still running the boarding house, but it had ceased to dominate her life. She also had several dogs, but she didn’t keep a commercial kennel. She had Woo, a cage full of chipmunks, and a cat. But finances continued to be very tight. Her two bottom-floor suites stood empty through the summer and fall of 1932.
In the fall of 1932 she caught her baker and a stranger peering in her studio windows. Furious at this invasion of her privacy, she raced out the door to the balcony where they stood.
“How dare you stare into my window? Go away.”
The baker apologized and explained that, “We didn’t mean to be rude – this ’ere feller,” thumbing toward the stranger, “loves pictures. Come along, I sez, I’ll show you!”
It gave Emily an idea. For some time she had thought Victoria needed an art gallery, although what she imagined was a noncommercial place where families of “all classes, all nationalities, all colours” could come to appreciate fine art. She imagined lectures and study groups and special help for young artists. If the cautious folk of Victoria’s Island Arts and Crafts Society didn’t like her art, maybe others would. She would give an exhibition for “ordinary” people and invite the general public.
“The People’s Gallery,” as she called it, was to be in the two empty suites on her main floor. She promptly had a door cut between them and hung an exhibition of her own with three other painters, including Lee Nam, who had been refused admittance to the Arts and Crafts Sketching Class.
The exhibition was so successful that several people began to work with Emily on the idea of creating a permanent People’s Art Gallery, a place where ordinary people walking through Beacon Hill Park on a Sunday could drop by, rest at the open fire, and see some art before going home.
Emily sent out invitations, and on December 14, the day after her sixty-first birthday, a meeting was held at Hill House. About forty people were present, including several members of City Council, a few members of the Island Arts and Crafts Society, and a reporter from the Victoria Colonist. Jack Shadbolt called the meeting to order.
According to the article published the next day in the Colonist, Miss Carr explained to those present that Victoria needed more exhibition space, space in which ordinary people felt comfortable and everyone felt wel-come, including those who had been banned from the Arts and Crafts Society. (Presumably she meant people like the young Chinese artist Lee Nam, who had been banned “because of his nationality.”) They didn’t need a lot of money – the Gallery could be modest – but even a modest gallery required the financial and moral support of many people.
At first there was great enthusiasm. A committee was formed and donations called for. Emily offered to rent the Gallery to the city at the “lowest possible rent,” and Eric Brown of the National Gallery in Ottawa promised to send exhibitions from the East.
But by January it was clear that although there was plenty of interest, the people with money were not willing to open their wallets. No doubt there was also some concern that eccentric, bad-tempered old Emily Carr might not be the most desirable curator of the place. It was finally decided that if Victoria couldn’t produce something better than Vancouver’s new art gallery, they would do nothing at all. Emily resealed her door and rented out the two lower suites.
In letters, she continued to ask Harris about his religion. She believed his God was the same as her own, but she was worried by the fact that theosophists did not pray and denied the divinity of Christ.
On a trip to Toronto in 1933 she had several long talks with Harris and with Bess and Fred Housser about their theosophical beliefs. If she could understand their attitude to God, she thought, it might help her find her own way as an artist. But that night she slept badly. She awoke at 5:00 a.m. feeling “soul-sick” and “churned by the whiz of it.” How could she live with no Bible, no Christ, no prayer as she had always known them?
Back in Victoria, she wrote and told Harris she could not accept theosophy. Emily went back to the “plain Bible” of her childhood faith, and they never mentioned the matter again.
But she believed more firmly than ever that there was a spiritual quality to art. The artist didn’t have to be religious in the organized sense; to be deeply sincere was itself a religion. What was vital was to find and tap into the “one substance, one life…that flows through all.”
What she now sought for herself, with all her heart and body, was a way to express that sense of something beyond the material, to be a channel, “clear, open, receptive” as she searched for the “divine” in everything.
Emily’s
